Bernie Sanders commissioned the Government Accountability Office to study the consequences of the high degree of indebtedness borne by Millennials; the GAO’s report concludes that Millennials dreams are being “crushed” by debts — primarily student loans — which have limited their abilities to seek good employment, good housing, and to save for retirement.
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Tag: student debt
Even if you pay off your student loan, be prepared to spend decades trying to get bottom-feeding debt-buyers to acknowledge it
Kaja Robinson is 53 and has a daughter about to go off to college, but she is still embroiled in bizarre, kafkaesque disputes over the $17,000 student loan she took out in the 1980s: for decades, she has had to set aside whole days to call debt collectors and try to get them to acknowledge the payments she’s made — for which she has paperwork, but which the lenders lost track of, causing her loans to balloon to $49,000.
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Bernie Sanders will use a tax on Wall Street speculators to wipe out $1.6 trillion in US student debt
Bernie Sanders’s latest campaign promise is a proposal to forgive all outstanding US student debt, and raising the $2.2 trillion needed over a decade to make lenders whole by taxing Wall Street speculators with a 0.5% tax on stock trades, a 0.1% fee on bonds, and a 0.005% fee on derivatives.
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Profiles of young Americans who entered voluntary exile rather than paying their student loans
CNBC profiles a small handful of young Americans who have moved abroad and ceased payments on their student debt, relying on international borders to protect them from their edu-creditors.
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Federal lawsuit calls college textbook/ebook packages a “scam”
The Virginia Pirate Corporation is a startup that brokers sales of used textbooks at colleges; they’re suing North Charleston, SC’s Trident Technical College over its inclusion of textbook fees in tuition, meaning that students will have already paid for new textbooks when they pay their tuition.
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That billionaire who paid off a graduating class’s student loans also supports the hedge-fundie’s favorite tax loophole
Billionaire Goldman Sachs alum Robert F Smith made headlines when he donated enough cash to pay off the student loan debt of the entire Class of 2019 at Morehouse College; but Smith is also an ardent supporter of the carried interest tax loophole, which allows the richest people in America to pay little to no tax on the bulk of their earnings, while working Americans (like the Morehouse Class of 2019 will be, shortly) pay their fair share.
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A former college admissions dean explains the mundane reverse affirmative action that lets the rich send their kids to the front of the line
Thanks to the college admissions scandal the issue of inequality and access to postsecondary education is now in our national conversation, but despite the glitz of the bribery scandal, the real issue is a much more mundane form of reverse affirmative action that allows wealthy Americans to dominate college admissions, muscling out better candidates from poorer backgrounds, especially Black students.
Elizabeth Warren’s latest proposal: cancel student debt, make college free
Elizabeth Warren has proposed a $1.25 trillion plan to forgive student debts and make all public college and university undergraduate education free, as well as earmarking $50B for historically Black colleges, and expanding federal grants to help pay for all students’ non-tuition expenses.
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Dentistry’s evidentiary vacuum allows profiteering butchers to raid our mouths for millions
Dentistry has always been medicine’s poor cousin, lower in prestige and funding, with much less definitive research; this means that it’s harder for someone to point at a procedure and definitively say, “That was unnecessary.”
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The two hidden intellectual moves behind the “progressive” argument against free college
Pete Buttigieg is one of the prominent members of the progressive wing of the Democratic party who opposes free college tuition, on the ground that the “benefits” of college accrue to those who attain a degree and that it’s unfair to ask the majority, who don’t attend college, to subsidize the minority who do.
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